Edengrall News

Remaking the navmeshes manually has allowed us to create preferential pathing, our navmeshes now have differential weights on the roads and paths making NPC pathing algorithms to prefer them.



The full navmesh is not done yet, as the navmesh pieces from the buildings are not fully integrated with the terrain navmeshes yet, but it should be done this week. The region/room system has also been improved to work on the new navmesh and this should solve our problems with pathfinding algorithms giving up on long travels by splitting the journey into several smaller pieces.

On the npc interaction front my brother enabled the old npc interaction system he had started, and is now improving it to be good enough for launch, it needs an UI overhaul, which I will work on after I finish the navmesh.

After wasting the last two weeks trying several auto-generated navmeshes and their pathing algorithms we couldn't find a single one that worked, the worst one being Unity's own, but I can't really blame the tool, as we found out navmeshes are not supposed to be used on such huge maps like ours.

Luckily my brother found a solution, following the saying "want something done right? Do it yourself!" That is right... the only way to get the pathfinding done is to manually make all the navmeshes ourselves... this means the work falls down to me, but well at least it worked on our tests, so this problem should finally be fixed.

I will also have to rework the room connections and configurations later since we decided to stop using that system until the pathfinding started working properly.

I took the region map and split in smaller meshes, working with several small navmeshes seems to do the trick



I also split the road into another mesh, so we can add a preferential path for the NPCs to walk on.

Unfortunately we didn`t get much done this week, asides from the pathfinding complications we both got the big-coof-that-should-not-be-named and it knocked us both down for a whole day, we have been good enough to work since then, but with blocked/runny noses and slight headaches, should take about 3 more days to fully recover at this rate.

Next week I will be doing the navmeshes for the buildings, since it has to be done manually...

Made all the 320+ windows, these are prefabs instead of being part of the building mesh, so they can animated and are much better for optimization. Still have to make a model for doors and the tall windows.



We added all the rooms and put them in a graph, my brother made a simple algorithm to create connections between the rooms based on proximity, while it worked on 80% of the cases, about 20% of the connections are wrong and I will have to fix it manually... this might take a while.



Once the connections are fixed and assigned proper weights for better pathing I will set the ownership of the rooms and the NPCs will finally be able to understand where they are and how to move through the city properly.

I made meshes for all regions adjacent to Edengrall, the new area total is 1.5km x 1.5km



The new meshes are not converted into biomes yet, so they are not technically ingame, we have to optimize the grass and test the impact of the new zones before adding them, if they are not in the game by the December release they will be on the first major patch.



If you look carefully you will notice different shades of green in some grassland areas, those are different soil types, some hard to reach places will have better soil, so making a farm directly outside the town is no longer the most effective, you can choose many different places for your farm, each will have advantages and disadvantages.



The water also has different biomes, beach, deep ocean and reef waters will affect the types of fish when we add fishing



Here the total planned area, the whole island will be 5km x 5km, so right now we only have 9% of the map done.

On the AI part my brother is finishing the algorithms required for the NPCs to move between rooms taking in consideration doors and the ownership of rooms, so NPCs won’t move through a room they don’t own or open doors they don’t have keys for.

My brother made a debug tool to see what the AI is doing in real time, this will make the development much easier, he coded a bunch of needs for testing and will make the AI attempt to fulfill those needs. Will be similar to something you see in games like Rimworld, but they will be able to interact with the player too.

On the terrain front I have finished two new areas (the leftmost ones) and I am now making the bamboo forest area that will be north of the town, it takes about 3 days per region, we want to have 9 of them total for release, the final game will have 100.

We cannot guarantee that the 8 new areas will appear on the Early Access release, as we need to optimize the grass system for such huge areas, but we will try.



The new areas have special biome variants, the area around the river and ponds now have irrigated grasslands, the minimum water on the soil is higher, so there is less requirement for manual irrigation, some areas have fertile soil, where the soil nutrients recover faster and some have better pastures, when we add animals they will prefer those areas, so there will be several choices for the player farm or farms as there will be no limit to the amount of farms you can build.

Planned Island below